Members of Congress from both parties, as well as some employers, insurers and state insurance commissioners, are calling for changes in the Affordable Care Act to prevent premium increases that are expected to affect workers at many small and midsize companies next year.
Lawmakers see the potential for a rare bipartisan agreement on the issue, after five years in which Republicans have repeatedly tried to repeal the law and Democrats have blocked their efforts.
A U.S. appeals court has ruled that President Barack Obama’s healthcare law violates the rights of religiously affiliated employers by forcing them to help provide contraceptive coverage even though they do not have to pay for it.
Parting ways with all other appeals courts that have considered the issue, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis on Thursday issued a pair of decisions upholding orders by two lower courts barring the government from enforcing the law’s contraceptive provisions against a group of religiously affiliated employers.
More than a year after launching, state-run health insurance exchanges, including Connecticut’s, still hadn’t fully completed key information technology functions, federal auditors said in a report released Wednesday.
The Government Accountability Office’s report, which noted that states have spent close to $1.45 billion in federal funds on IT systems for the insurance marketplaces created by the federal health law, rated the 14 state-run exchanges’ capabilities as of February in four categories.
More than 2 million public exchange enrollees eligible for cost-sharing reductions are not receiving the subsides because they selected a non-qualifying plan, a recent analysis from consultancy Avalere has found. The oversight could have been avoided with better decision-making tools and the help of trusted advisers, benefit experts agree.
According to the report published in August 2015 by Deloitte, only 30% of consumers who enrolled in health insurance through a government-run exchange were satisfied with their plan.1 By contrast, a separate survey of eHealth shoppers published in February 2015 found that 69% of health insurance shoppers who purchased through eHealth were satisfied with the value of their plan.
The Census Bureau has finally released definitive statistics on the number of uninsured in 2014 and the news is not good for Obamacare (unless, of course, you have abysmally low expectations for government performance). The population-wide uninsured rate fell from 14.5% in calendar year 2013 to 11.7% in 2014. The total number of uninsured dropped from 45.2 million in 2013 to 36.7 million in 2014–a net of 8.5 million who gained coverage.
What a difference four years — and millions of people with health insurance — can make in the Republican presidential campaign.
In 2011, the last time GOP candidates for president gathered for a debate at the Ronald Reagan Library, the topic of the Affordable Care Act came up early and often.
Sitting in his bunker-like chambers in the Speaker’s Office, he admitted to looking a little glassy-eyed. “It was an early morning,” he said, but when you have an 18-month-old, most mornings are. While Jacob, his youngest, will soon age out of 4 a.m. wake up calls, Edattel and his wife are expecting their third, a girl, in December.
And because he’s House Speaker John Boehner’s new health policy guru, his early mornings will be bookended by late nights.
In its annual report on poverty and the uninsured, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that: “The percentage of people without health insurance coverage for the entire 2014 calendar year was 10.4 percent, down from 13.3 percent in 2013. The number of people without health insurance declined to 33.0 million from 41.8 million over the period.” (Our analysis shows that virtually all of the increase in the number of people with health insurance has come from Medicaid expansion.)
Massachusetts residents purchasing unsubsidized health insurance plans through the Massachusetts Health Connector should expect to see their premium costs rise, and some will see their co-pays and deductibles go up as well.